August 2007

Tests May Postpone Deliveries Of SCBA

By Lyn Bixby

It is possible that no manufacturers of self-contained breathing apparatus will have units certified under tough, new National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standards before the requirements take effect at the end of this month.

If that is the case, as of Aug. 31, the seven companies that make SCBA will have to stop delivering their products as NFPA-compliant until they manage to complete the required tests.

“If I were to hazard a guess at this point, I would say that come Sept. 1, there’s a good possibility no one will be certified,” Survivair SCBA Senior Product Manager Steven Weinstein said in an interview last month. “So for at least a while, and it’s unclear how long that will be, there will be no SCBAs being shipped with NFPA labels.”

That would create production headaches for the companies, which have invested millions of dollars over the past two years to try to meet the new standards. It has been, by far, the most expensive research and development effort since the development of SCBA, according to the manufacturers.

Delays in shipping new SCBA units would also be frustrating for firefighters across the country who have postponed purchases so they could have the latest, safest, most reliable models, even though the new units will be considerably more expensive.

The most significant changes to the NFPA standards are in response to investigations of firefighter deaths that raised questions about the reliability of personal alert safety system (PASS) alarms, which are integrated into SCBA.

To be certified, the new SCBA units have to pass a series of rigorous tests that are conducted under strict secrecy. Company representatives at the various test sites look for evidence as to how their competitors are doing and report back to their bosses. But nobody knows for sure.

“Scott, if they haven’t been certified yet, are close,” one SCBA supervisor from a competing company said in an interview in July. “Their boxes were up there, and they said ‘done’ and ‘ok’ on them. I haven’t looked today, but as of a few days ago, Scott wasn’t on the list yet.”

Scott Health & Safety is the leading manufacturer of SCBA, and “the list” of certified products is maintained by the Safety Equipment Institute on its Web site – seinet.org. SEI is a private, non-profit organization established to administer third-party testing and certification programs for a broad range of safety and protective products, including SCBA for the NFPA.

Managers at all the SCBA companies regularly check the SEI list to see which manufacturer will be the first to have a unit certified.

“The testing agency for NFPA does not tell us and they don’t tell other manufacturers how the other manufacturers are doing,” Scott SCBA Product Manager David Trivette said in an interview. “I would love to know how the others are doing and how far along they are.”

The Big Unknown

It turns out Scott is doing quite well, according to Trivette. But he said he has no idea when the company will cross the finish line and be certified. Scott has already passed the most difficult tests, but the big unknown is testing for protection from CBRN – chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear contamination – which is conducted at the U.S. Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

“You can come close to predicting how long the other tests will take, but the one wildcard has always been CBRN,” Trivette said. “Our CBRN submissions in the past have taken up to nine months. But we’re hoping that because of the impending [Aug. 31] deadline that it won’t take months.”

An inquiry about whether SCBA manufacturers would have priority in the CBRN testing schedule was referred by Edgewood officials to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, where spokesman Fred Blosser said, “If a manufacturer already has applied for certification, we anticipate that testing will be completed within the time frame needed… barring any unforeseen problems.”

He said the CBRN testing and approval process takes approximately 90 days.

In addition to being the longest of the testing processes, CBRN is the most expensive.

Survivair’s Weinstein said the CBRN fee this year will be about $42,000 per test for his company. Because Survivair is seeking to certify SCBA units at different pressures – 2,216 psi, 3,000 psi and 4,500 psi – it must pay a separate fee for each test for a total of about $126,000.

In addition to the cost of the testing, he said companies must absorb the cost of the units tested because they are destroyed. And if a company does not pass the first test, he said it has to pay the same fee for each subsequent test until its unit is approved.

“What really kills you is if you fail, you don’t know why you failed. It’s trial and error,” Weinstein said. “As soon as the test is over, those SCBA are destroyed because they’re contaminated with live agents. They are immediately destroyed, you don’t even have a chance to look at them, let alone analyze them. You just have to guess why you might have failed.”

A Public Alert About PASS

CBRN is one of three categories of tests that the companies must pass for their units to meet the new NFPA standards. The other categories are known as NIOSH – tests conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health – and NFPA – other tests specified by the 2007 editions of NFPA 1981, the standard for SCBA, and NFPA 1982, the standard for PASS alarms.

In December 2005, the NFPA issued a public alert amid growing doubts about the reliability of PASS alarms. The alert, titled “PASS alarm signals can fail at high temperatures,” was triggered by NIOSH investigations of the deaths of four firefighters between 2001 and 2004 that found their PASS signals were not heard or were barely audible. Laboratory tests showed sound reduction might begin to occur at 300 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the alert.

In December 2006 the NFPA’s Technical Committee on Electronic Safety Equipment voted to approve a new 2007 edition of NFPA 1982. It was the fifth revision of the standard that was established in 1983, and it added new requirements to test the effects of heat, water, vibration and muffling on PASS alarms.

The most difficult test, according to the manufacturers, is the heat and water immersion test, also known as “heat and dunk.”

Survivair’s Weinstein, a member of the NFPA technical committee, describes the test this way: “They put the SCBA in an oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes, take it out, immediately dunk it in water, let it sit in water for 15 minutes, take it out of the water and throw it back in the oven for 15 minutes, back in the water, back and forth through six cycles and at the end of the sixth cycle, they open up the battery compartment and the electronic compartment and any electronic devices and there can be no moisture inside any of those areas. None whatsoever.”

At the time he was interviewed in mid July, Weinstein said Survivair had not gone through the NFPA heat and dunk test.

“That’s an extremely difficult test,” he said, “and the intelligence we’ve been getting indicates that’s where most of the people have been failing.”

Neverthless, he expressed confidence that Survivair would pass the test. “We think we’re fine,” he said.

Trivette, the Scott SCBA manager, said his company had passed the heat and immersion test, but declined to say when it passed. He agreed, “It is a very extreme test.”

Mike Rupert, the first responder product group manager for Mine Safety Appliances (MSA), another top SCBA manufacturer, is also a member of the NFPA technical committee that developed the new edition of NFPA 1982.

“The standard is geared toward improving the durability of electronics in the fire service,” he said. “That was the primary driver of the new standards, the durability and the performance of electronics.”

He said competing forces are at work trying to destroy the PASS alarm in the heat and dunk test.

“When you go into the oven, the air expands and pushes against the gaskets, the seals. It’s pushing against them to try to open the device,” he said. “At the same time 350 [degrees] is a temperature that can start to soften plastics. So it’s trying to push it open, it’s softening it, and then you put it immediately into water, which is doing exactly the opposite, it’s forcing water in and creating a vacuum to pull the water in. So it’s very challenging.”

He said another test that is particularly tough is the high-temperature test, where a PASS alarm is mounted in an oven at 500 degrees Fahrenheit and its alarm signal and data logging functions must operate properly and it must not show evidence of melting, dripping or igniting.

As of late July, some of the companies had passed some of the tests required for compliance, but no company had passed all of them. They were in the process of shutting off orders for their old products and preparing to take orders for new units, confident that they would be certified, but unsure of when that would happen.

SCBA Purchases Delayed

MSA has been more aggressive than the other companies in marketing its new product in anticipation of certification, the Firehawk M7, which is featured on its Web site. “We have a white paper and pictures of our unit,” Rupert said. “I think we are the only manufacturer who put that information out there.”

SCBA managers said the trend among fire departments has been to postpone purchases and wait for the new 2007-compliant units to become available.

Trivette said many departments that were approved last year for federal Fire Act grant funding to buy SCBA are waiting for the new models. He said they can wait up to a year to spend the money and can also apply for extensions beyond a year.

Some of the manufacturers have developed new products to meet the new 2007 standards, and others have modified existing units.

“It is the electronics that were completely redesigned in the case of MSA,” Rupert said. “The air delivery system is the same, the regulators, the hoses, the cylinders, the valves, that’s all the same.”

Investments In Millions

Suvivair developed an entirely new unit. “It’s costing us probably a lot more than most everybody else because we decided to start from scratch,” Weinstein said. “The last time we introduced a whole new model was in 1998, and that’s nine years ago now. It was time.”

Scott developed two new models. “The NxG7 is just a modification to an existing [NxG2] unit,” said Trivette. “We’ve made all the changes necessary for the electronics. The Air-Pak 75 is a complete facelift of the Air-Pak Fifty. We took a lot of user suggestions over the past couple of years and rolled them into the Air-Pak 75.”

The investments made by the companies in developing the new units are estimated by their managers to be in the millions.

“We’re in seven digits, and I wouldn’t be shocked, when all is said and done, that we reach eight digits,” said Trivette. “It’s the most expensive standard to date.”

Back in the 1940s, when Earl Scott, the founder of the company, developed its first Air-Pak SCBA, the price was $160. “Today, a complete breathing apparatus with this new standard and everything that’s been put into it is borderline about $6,000,” Trivette said.

The huge investments required to comply with the ever-changing standards set by the government and NFPA limit the number of companies that are able to compete in the SCBA marketplace.

“This is why there hasn’t been a new entrant into the SCBA business in a long time and there probably never will be,” Weinstein said. “It just costs so much money to get into the business and to maintain certifications.”